Selective Openness: America's Path to Technological Dominance

As Congress debates the American Innovation and R&D Act of 2025, the United States is facing an existential test: how to maintain its technological supremacy in a world marked by increasingly intense global rivalries, especially with China. This isn’t just a competition of money; it's about national security. China’s version of America’s GPT-4 model, the DeepSeek AI model, has already shrunk America’s lead in artificial intelligence to months and underscored how our defense innovation ecosystem is still broken.

We offer a more nuanced and balanced solution to this dilemma—one that carefully demarcates the technologies that should remain open to international collaboration and those critical innovations we must guard more zealously.

First, broad openness ought to prevail for technologies that create vast opportunities for economic growth and positive societal application but carry little military risk. Examples like healthcare AI, general-purpose machine learning frameworks, and technologies aimed at the public good should be collaborative, global efforts.

Second, sensitive technologies vital to national security must have clear boundaries and protections. We must protect chip designs, quantum computing applications, and state-of-the-art AI models utilized in defense communications. Think of it as giving your favorite family recipes to close friends only instead of posting them online for everyone to see—strategically protective but also collaboratively advantageous.

Third, we need significant new investments in homegrown R&D. The Innovation and R&D Competitiveness Act lays out an agenda to strengthen America’s technological leadership, protect us from overdependence on global ecosystems vulnerable to exploitation, and assure continued U.S. advantage in innovation.

Lastly, closer ties and cooperation with reliable global partners must be strengthened and further developed. Pacts such as the U.S.-UK-Australia AUKUS agreement demonstrate how limited partnership can enhance our international standing, rather than entail isolation. These alliances also establish areas for seeking innovation and trust-based collaboration that positively influence security and technological development.

Critics of controlled openness are concerned that those restrictions could corrode the core openness that has long fueled American innovation. We recognize this concern and agree that transparency is essential. However, in today’s global environment, selective strategic caution is both necessary and prudent to safeguard the technological capabilities that underpin our national security and long-term prosperity.

The choice facing Congress and the American public is not a black-and-white one of full transparency or none at all. It is about prudently managing our openness, striking a strategic balance that safeguards America’s technological advantages and allows for continued innovation and prosperity.

At this moment, lawmakers are responsible for designing policies, including the Innovation and R&D Competitiveness Act, that embrace open innovation and robustly defend our strategic tech assets. Every day we delay, our adversaries gain ground—not just in labs, but on the battlefield and our economy. If Congress fails to act decisively, the U.S. risks losing its innovation edge and its ability to defend against next-generation threats. America’s strength has always come from our willingness to be selectively open and strategically innovative. Let’s make sure we keep this essential competitive edge.

Jags Kandasamy is CEO and Co-founder of Latent AI, Commissioner on Software Defined Warfare at the Atlantic Council, and Distinguished Fellow at GNSI USF Tampa. Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan (USAF, Ret.) was the Founding Director of the DoD Joint Artificial Intelligence Center and serves on the Latent AI Advisory Board and as a CNAS Adjunct Senior Fellow.